“None of these things are perfect, but it’s a good opportunity and a good way to dial into a circuit and get yourself familiar with some of the notes that you have from last year, in terms of things to watch for.

“They can try different lines and try different things. The package that we’ve got from Simworx is really good and it allows us to do that.

“It’s something we’re going to continue to improve and continue working on ensuring we get the correlation as close to practical – it’ll never match the real thing, of course, but it’s certainly a good start.

“We’ve seen an improvement in our on-track performance and driver confidence since we’ve started using it.”

McLaughlin and Coulthard are not the only personnel to have spent time on the machine, with Dick Johnson and various engineers having also sampled it.

Story says having a tool through which driver and engineer can pre-empt the coming event’s talking points is beneficial, especially for the first-year partnership between Coulthard and Mark Fenning.

“Both of our drivers are quite good, particularly Scott, at taking notes and having a real thorough post-game analysis of what went right and what went wrong and why,” Story added.

“It gives you the opportunity as part of that review to hit the track and try a few things out.

“One of the things where it’s been quite useful is the engineers actually getting into the sim and squirting a few laps.

“That allows them to sort of understand what the driver’s talking about, getting some of those language calls right, so that they’re speaking – particularly with Mark and Fabian – about the same thing.